Your Startup Doesn't Need to Be a Unicorn

I’m new to Substack—this is my first post. Hey, I’m Matt. I founded Vizzly as a first-time entrepreneur and exited in under three years, selling the company to WPP, the world’s largest advertising organization. A few months after starting the company, we were accepted into Y-Combinator, and I spent about four months engrossed in San Francisco’s tech hustle culture learning from people much smarter than I. I’m not anti-SF (far from it; I have some incredible memories there), but I didn’t buy into the all-or-nothing mindset of startups. It’s worth noting that after Demo Day, we set out to raise more than we ended up with—essentially, a failed Seed round. At the time, I saw this as a negative, assuming fundraising was a form of validation (turns out it’s not, by the way). A year later, I came to realize that this was the best thing to happen to both the company and myself. For starters, it forced us to become very revenue-centric. Additionally, it opened the door to smaller acquisitio ... Read full article.